Wednesday

060

March 19, 2008 :: I love it when my food is photogenic.

Today, it was spring.

It all started last night at ten thirty pm, after Blake and I attempted to concentrate on No Country for Old Men while passing a lunatic bundle of white fir and pointy daggers back and forth. (You take her...no, you take her...no...get a chewy...aaarrgh! She's on my back! AAARRRgh! She's biting the cat's tail!...and so it went). I stepped out onto the porch for a breather after our inevitably heated discussion of the movie's ending (I have ideas about what happened there, but will only discuss if you've seen the movie. You'll do well to wait until I've calmed down, actually. I think I actually tired Blake out over it, and he point-counterpoints movie endings and literary twists with more stamina than anyone I've ever met.), and noticed that it was no longer coat weather after dark in Georgia. Well, for that one night. But, I was off and running.

Today, I made plans for this weekend: Digging. Clearing of rubbish. Raking - much raking. And, this afternoon, I bought seeds. SEEEEEDS.

No man, you don't understand. The italics up there convey the culmination of months of meticulous planning, pouring over revelations in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, perusing catalogs over Christmas dinner and the hand-rendering of rather nice little garden diagrams. I pre-set the basket for my order at the heirloom seed site, and saved it a month ago. I discussed with anyone who would listen my need for horseradish to compliment potato growth, beans to pair with tomatoes. I plied Blake for his relative tolerance to jalapeño heat (nuclear, it seems). And then i sent the seeds for about 1/2 of what we'll grow on their way to Georgia. Here's the haul, so far:
  • Chinese red and white flower hyacinth beans (for the fences)
  • Blue Lake bush beans
  • Catskill Brussels Sprouts
  • Early Jersey Wakefield cabbage
  • Bells of Ireland (flowers my grandmother grew in her garden)
  • Tam Jalapeño
  • Roberto's Cuban Seasoning bonnet peppers (burning beautiousness)
  • Arugula
  • Clemson Spineless okra
  • New Zealand Spinach (heat and drought tolerant down-underers perfect for the South)
  • Envy (a very cool name for a bright green edamame soy bean)
  • Spear's Tennessee Green tomatoes (I live with a southern boy, remember)
  • Royal Chico roma tomatoes
  • Hazelfield Farm slicing tomatoes
  • Bianca Dinassia Onions (small, sweet, italian)
  • Red Creole onions (blood red, spicy southerners)
  • Italian Eggplant (that looks like a speckled dinosaur egg)
Still looking for potato starts, a meyer lemon tree, a heavy-bearing blueberry bush that can be grown in a pot, big fat rosemary plants, herbs like chive and thai basil and mint, 2-year old asparagus starts (I'm impatient.), and some kind of tree for the front yard. (Apple, Avocado or Weeping Willow? Boy do I wish I had a larger yard.)

The babies are on their way now. No turning back. This could be a miserable failure that sends me back to the cool, tiled arms of Mr. Kroger. Or, it could be a freeing triumph--an amazing victory for someone who has traditionally had somewhere between a jaundiced and cholera-tinted thumb. We'll see.

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